Idaho struggles with mussels

Despite pouring truckloads of toxic chemicals into the water, the Idaho State Department of Agriculture recently detected a small number of quagga mussels in the Twin Falls area of the Snake River, and the repercussions are being felt in the Okanagan.

"It's a huge concern," Blair Ireland, chair of the Okanagan Water Basin Board said Friday.

"The very fact that they dumped a couple of trucks of aquacide into the river to chase it down and get it ... we had our doubts it would work but, at the same time, you hope it will with that kind of effort. It brings the ever present danger that was so close to us, back."

The Idaho river was treated with a chelated copper product in 2023. It was the first treatment of this type and scale ever attempted in North America. Sampling results indicated it was effective in reducing the mussel population, the Idaho State Department of Agriculture said.

More, however, will be needed.

But it's not a path that could be followed in the Okanagan, should the mussel show up.

"It killed a lot of fish and aquatic life," Ireland said. "That is not an ideal solution. Our lake is a static lake, not a river, and it’s our drinking water source. We don’t want to put chemicals in our drinking water source."

Ireland and the water advocacy group are still of the mind that avoiding getting the mussel in local waterways in the first place is the only way forward.

That, he said, would involve stricter controls from south of the border.

"Banning recreational boats from the US is what’s needed," he said. "More efficient checks have been put in, but anyone who travels across the border knows it depends who is there at the time ... closing that border means we wouldn’t have to check and there’s an immense amount of savings there."

The other threat comes from within Canada, and efforts to get stricter controls in from that area are also underway.

Ireland has said in the past that the mussels the would destroy the Okanagan way of life.

Once it got into the lake, the water would turn crystal clear as the mussel ate everything in its path. After two years of that, the mussels die because they have a very short life cycle, and the water would then become algae-ridden.

Beaches are destroyed by their razor sharp husks and the ecosystem is decimated. The mussels clog pipes that deliver water for drinking, energy, agriculture, recreation and a variety of other uses. They also can negatively affect fish populations and wildlife habitat.

If left to spread untreated, they form dense colonies that damage and hinder infrastructure so severely it would have cost Idaho hundreds of millions of dollars in actual and indirect costs. This would affect every irrigator, power users, swimmers and boaters.

These risks are why officials in Idaho took such drastic measures to try and eliminate the mussels.